June 4, 2014 — Riverside Drive between Beale and W. Georgia is closed to traffic while the road is re-striped to to accommodate bike and pedestrian traffic. (Mike Brown/The Commercial Appeal)

Riverside Drive will have a new look and function when it reopens Friday. Blocked to traffic for the last two weeks, the one-mile stretch between Beale Street and Georgia will lose two traffic lanes but gain the city's second protected bike lane.

The city initiative is a pilot project that officials hope will become a model for making Memphis streets more bike and pedestrian friendly.

The grass and tree-lined median that had separated north and southbound traffic now will separate Riverside traffic from bicyclists.

"Around this time next year we will be repaving Riverside Drive and this project will give us an opportunity to rethink how the lanes are allocated," said John Cameron, director of engineering for the city of Memphis.

The project also aims to reduce speeding on Riverside, said the city's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, Kyle Wagenschutz. Cameron says the city is considering dropping the highway speed for traffic coming off Interstate 55 on Riverside.

"One of our goals is to make traffic not such a barrier to those crossing Riverside Drive to access the parks on the river," Wagenschutz said.

Project overseers will measure changes in traffic flow on different streets. City engineers have historical data on Second, Third, and Danny Thomas, and will look at how that changes with the test project.

"We think once people see it on the ground and see how it works- and we think it will work- any concerns they have will be alleviated over the next 12 months," Cameron said.

Last March the city hired urban planning consultant Jeff Speck to design a recreational plan for Downtown and the riverfront. The top proposal, of six delivered by Speck, was a revision to Riverside Drive to make the riverfront more accessible.

"What we are doing with the pilot program is a little different than what Jeff Speck recommended. We have taken his design and tweaked it to make it pilotable and workable in the short term," Wagenschutz said.

Memphis' first protected bike lane, installed last fall along Overton Park Avenue between Bellevue and Cleveland, is buffered from traffic by a three-foot-wide painted zone.

City officials and project organizers are optimistic about the Riverside Drive conversion, but some Downtown residents have voiced concern.

"I think what the city is trying to do with bike lanes is fantastic, but people are wondering what it is going to do to traffic," said Lawrence Migliara, a Downtown resident and co-owner of Outdoors Inc.

The city plans to build about 15 miles of protected bike lanes, mostly painted buffer zones, within the next 12 months. Most of those lanes will be in the Downtown area, Cameron said.

Over the next 12-18 months, city leaders will review the pilot project, look at different street configurations, and seek public input on what is working — and what's not — with at least three public meetings.

"Analyzing the effects of something that is actually on the ground rather than discussions of diagrams and drawings is a way that has really allowed the city to be much more impactful in how it is spending its capital funding for much bigger projects in the future and that those projects are meaningful to citizens and businesses in the community," Wagenschutz said.

Protected Bike Lanes

Compared to traditional bike lanes, protected lanes provide more space and sometimes a physical barrier between the bike lane and the motor vehicle lane. As cities aim to increase bicycle transportation, the demand for protected bicycle lanes has increased.

Some of the findings:

Bike ridership in an area increased by an average of 75 percent in the first year when protected bike lanes were added to a street, according to The National Institute for Transportation and Communities.

65 percent of Americans who don't bike said they would if offered protected bike lanes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Protected lanes reduce bicyclist injury risk up to 90 percent, according to the American Journal of Public Health.